Mount Saint Anne, Mount Henry Crossroads, Killenard, Co. Laois

Mount Saint Anne does exactly this: a three-bay, two-storey block set over a basement, its front announced by a pedimented Ionic portico, its ends softened by a pair of bowed bays that curve outward like parentheses around the main facade. The effect is neo-Classical in the strictest sense, all measured proportion and restrained ornament, yet the bowed ends give it a plasticity that flat-fronted Georgian houses rarely have.

The house dates to around 1820, placing it firmly within the last great flowering of the Irish country house before the political and economic upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century began to thin their ranks. Its design has been attributed to Richard Morrison, one of the more prolific and adaptable architects working in Ireland at the time. Morrison, who lived from 1767 to 1849, moved comfortably between Gothic and Classical idioms depending on his client's taste, and Mount Saint Anne shows him working in the latter mode with particular assurance. The Ionic order used on the portico, with its distinctive scrolled capitals, was a common choice for houses aiming at gravity without excess, and the pediment above it, a triangular gable end borrowed from classical temple fronts, reinforces that sense of restrained authority. The basement level below the main floors was typical of the period, tucking service functions out of sight and allowing the principal rooms to sit at a slight remove from the ground, both literally and socially.

What makes the house worth pausing over is the way its two defining features, the strict Classical portico and the curved bowed bays, sit together without contradiction. Bow-ended rooms were prized in this period for the quality of light they admitted and the views they framed, often housing a drawing room or study where the curve of the wall let windows wrap around a wider arc of the landscape than a flat facade could manage. Paired with the formality of the Ionic entrance, the result is a house that reads as ceremonial from the front and almost intimate from the side, two moods held in the one elevation.